By Lisa Baue
The numbers have dropped for the last two years in employee engagement, and they should stop every funeral and death care service company owner and leader in their tracks.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report, the world’s largest ongoing study of the employee experience, found that global employee engagement only at 20 percent.
That’s the second consecutive year of decline, down from a peak of 23 percent in 2022. And for the first time in Gallup’s history of tracking this data, no region of the world saw engagement rise.
Let that land for a moment.
Eight out of every 10 workers, globally, are not engaged at work.
This Is a Crisis. And It’s Costing Everyone.
Gallup defines engagement as the psychological attachment workers have to their work, their team and their employer. It’s not about being happy on a given Tuesday. It’s about whether someone is truly invested, showing up with purpose, staying because they want to, and contributing at a level that lifts everyone around them.
When that’s missing, the consequences are measurable. According to Gallup, low engagement cost the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity last year. That’s roughly 9 percent of global GDP, gone.
Now apply that math to our profession.
We are not immune to workforce trends. If anything, it accelerates them. We deal in grief, loss, long hours and emotionally demanding work every single day. If you are a supplier company, or someone who does not work on front lines, there are still pressures, still feelings of burnout, corporate travel, pressure of deadlines all while supporting others on your team.
If 80 percent of the global workforce is disengaged, there is no reason to believe our profession fares any better. And the emotional weight of this work makes connection, meaning and belonging even more critical, not less.
I have heard this firsthand. From women at national conferences, from clients I coach one on one, and from recent graduates just starting out who are already questioning whether they can stay. They are burnt out, stressed, carrying student loans, and often barely surviving financially. Their owners and managers are telling them, “This is just the way it is. Get used to it, or leave.”
That is not leadership. That is a retention disaster in slow motion that is occurring behind the scenes.
Disengaged employees don’t stay. They leave. They take their training, their relationships and their institutional knowledge with them, and they walk out the door to something that feels like it actually sees them.
The Manager Problem Is Real, and It Hits Women Harder
Here’s where it gets particularly relevant for you, if you are a woman in this profession.
Gallup found that the biggest driver of the engagement decline is actually among managers, not frontline employees. Since 2022, manager engagement has dropped nine points. It has fallen from 27 percent to 22 percent between 2024 and 2025 alone. Managers used to carry an “engagement premium.” That premium has evaporated.
What does this mean for you?
If you are stepping into a position of leadership, taking on ownership roles, managing staff and carrying the weight of running a business while serving families or a department of many team members, you are doing all of that in a landscape where leadership itself is increasingly draining.
Gallup’s data shows that leaders report experiencing significantly more:
stress (+7 points)
anger (+12 points)
sadness (+11 points)
loneliness (+10 points) than individual contributors.
More responsibility, emotional burden and less support.
That is not sustainable. And for women who are still fighting to be seen as credible in a historically male-dominated field, it is an even heavier lift. I know this not just from research but from forty-four years in this profession, thirty-eight of them as a CEO and owner. I have lived it. And I have watched too many capable, passionate women carry it alone until they simply couldn’t anymore.
Engagement Is the Antidote. Connection Is the Path.
Here is what Gallup also found: when managers are engaged, everything changes. Engaged managers experience all negative emotions at lower rates. They are 14 points more likely to be thriving overall. The burden of leadership actually lifts.
This did not surprise me. I watched it happen in my own company. When I made the decision to invest in my people, to build Baue University, to make mentorship a priority and leadership development a non-negotiable, our retention rate climbed to a steady and consistent 98 percent in the last decade of my ownership. Our client satisfaction reached levels we had never seen. And our business grew exponentially.
Not because I focused more on profits. Because I focused more on a people first culture. One where we listened to our team, we asked them , how can we make Baue better in areas of employee support, training and development. We asked a very difficult question to each and every person. “How can I be a better manager and supporter of you?”
Engagement doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when you feel connected to those you work with every day, when you connect to their hearts, when you surround yourself with servant leaders at all levels. Leaders who understand what the team and individual is carrying, and give them the support and care they truly seek and need.
That is exactly why I wrote my book “Wake Up Calls” about my journey to become a better leader that supported and engaged others.
And why I founded and launched the Funeral Women Lead Foundation in 2025 a 501C3 dedicated to developing women as leaders in areas of wellness and leadership.
Why This Is the Moment to Invest in Your People
The funeral and death care profession cannot afford an 80 percent disengagement rate. Not in a time when our team members need consistency, when succession planning is urgent and when the next generation of women leaders is deciding right now whether to stay or go.
Funeral Women Lead is the only organization built entirely around advancing women in this profession long term, not as a single one time a year program, but as a year-round, sustained commitment to women’s development, connection and leadership.
Here is how Funeral Women Lead is addressing this crisis directly:
The 2026 Unleashed Leadership and Wellness Summit (September 28 to 30 at the Wild Dunes Resort, Charleston, SC) is built around the engagement equation: purpose, community, renewal and vision. It is not a checkbox. It is a turning point. After this Summit an ongoing Leadership and Wellness Community will continue to support women long term.
The Women’s Leadership Academy is an 18-month cohort program that gives you the long-arc development you need to grow into and sustain leadership roles, with the engagement and support structure that makes it stick. It kicks off with a one day in person on September 27th right before the Summit.
Funeral Women Lead Membership brings year-round community, resources and belonging to women wherever they are in their career, because engagement doesn’t happen once a year at a conference. It has to be built into the fabric of how we work.
Webinars, regional programming and content keep you connected to each other and to the broader movement between events, so the momentum doesn’t evaporate the moment you get back to your funeral home.
What Owners and Leaders Can Do Right Now
If you lead a funeral home or a group of funeral homes, are a manager or in Senior Leadership in a larger business or supplier company, Gallup’s data is a call to action.
Your team is made up of people who chose one of the most meaningful, demanding professions in existence. They didn’t get into this work because they stopped caring. But the conditions around them can make caring feel impossible.
Investing in your women by sending them to our Leadership and Wellness Summit and into the Academy is not a perk. It is a retention strategy, a leadership pipeline investment, it is how you signal that you see them, and that you are not willing to lose them to disengagement.
The world’s workplaces are struggling. Funeral service and the death care profession doesn’t have to.
The women of our profession deserve better and I am here to make sure they get it.
I would love to hear from you more and if you would like to help advocate for women further, please help us by taking our part in our annual women’s pulse survey here.
Help us hear your voice and pass this survey on to other women you know.
Help us Unleash the Greatness in Women and help companies to better work on engaging and retaining them.
